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| Caveats to Ungoogled Chromium recommendations | 2024-07-15T00:05:38-04:00 |
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In the wake of a certain ad-funded browser company bundling adtech into its browser yet again, some people have been recommending Ungoogled-Chromium (UGC). I think it's fine to recommend UGC with caveats, such as the fact that it disables component updates that include:
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Certificate revocation. Chromium uses downloaded CRLSets for revocation; it does not support OCSP.
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Out of band security patches. When browser components have exploits in the wild, they need to be patched ASAP; updating billions of installations within time-frames measured in hours often means restartless out-of-band updates.
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Out of band certificate bundle updates.
If you assume Google uses its component update server logs maliciously, you may wish to consider a fork that still offers component updates provided by a different party's servers.
UGC disabled mDNS at one point. This exposed local IP addresses over WebRTC for years, but they seem to have shipped a fix in May 2023 to disable non-proxied UDP.
UGC also disables the Chrome Web Store in favor of installing extensions out of band. Make sure you regularly update your extensions installed out-of-band, since UGC won't do it on its own. Some scripts and a special extension re-implement some of this functionality.
Overall, UGC is still safer than QtWebEngine despite making heavy compromises to security for privacy (though I can't see how either benefited from disabling mDNS: I'm not aware of threat models under which revealing a local IP to every application is preferable to revealing it to just Google). Running UGC is fine if you understand these trade-offs and have accounted for them. I use it in headless mode to run accessibility and performance tests.